Legacy
by riddleberry
Summary: Everybody knows that everybody suffers. And nobody knows that better than the Doctor. As the scars left by his tragic past blaze angrily on the surfaces of his hearts, he must learn to hoist himself from misery and live on, starting with letting Clara Oswin Oswald into his life for good.
1. Skeletons

"Oh, just tell me! It's not like I have any room to judge!" A highly amused Clara Oswald squeaked at the Doctor, who was sweating through the knots of his burgundy bow-tie with discomfort as she grilled him about his past romantic ventures.

"Look, Doctor, we've all got some promiscuous skeletons in our closets. I'll have you know, I dated a woman once."

"Yes, well, so did I. Doesn't mean I'd like to talk to you about it. I don't need your pity soufflés. Or your normal soufflés. You know, you really should try a recipe beca-"

"Oi! Watch it, chin. I'm an _excellent_ baker, thank you very much. In fact, when I get off this intergalactic tour you've got me on, I might open up my own little shop."

The Doctor's face fell as Clara launched into an animated tale about her late grandmother's dreams of being a pastry shop owner. Was she really so keen to leave and settle down for a life on Earth? Without him? Without the TARDIS? Would she really trade him for some nearly-bankrupt bakery in the countryside? Lost in a pool of thoughts of Clara's inevitable egress, the Doctor didn't notice when she stopped babbling.

"Something wrong? Are you offended by cakes?" Clara giggled sarcastically, drawing nearer to her companion.

When no words came from his mouth, Clara snapped out of her cheery state and squeezed his palm. They had only been traveling together for a matter of weeks, but Clara had already picked up on most of the Doctor's little quirks and distress signals. Silence was one of them. He'd only fallen dramatically silent in her presence once before, and that had been due to her inquiries about a pair of reading glasses on the TARDIS console. She'd never quite been able to get the truth out of him about that.

"You know I'm only joking. This traveling business with you wins out over soufflés, even if only by a small margin. I won't ever leave this place, I promise." She whispered, grinning softly and brushing a few errant hairs from his forehead.

The Doctor bit his lower lip and glanced over at Amelia Pond's old reading glasses nestled carefully between the scanner and the "structure eject" button. Ancient memories he'd previously locked away burst from their iron prisons and flashed before his eyes. Over 1,300 years of memories of laughter, tears, and bittersweet endings flooded the lonely soldier's mind and turned his limbs to jelly. The moment he began to collapse, Clara clutched him by the elbows and gently lowered his quivering form to the metallic floor of the TARDIS. She had never seen such a tragic sight-an ancient god of sorts with all the knowledge and power of the universe whizzing through his veins with each beat of his hearts unable to bear the force of gravity. This was a man who had seen far too much yet had been capable of doing far too little. This was a man who had his soul entrenched in despair too many times to count.

This was a man who had lost somebody. Probably more than once.

"Did they all leave you? The people who traveled with you before me, did they leave? Did _she _leave you, the owner of those glasses?" Clara pried quietly, removing her shawl and wrapping it carefully around the Doctor's thin yet sturdy shoulders.

"No. Worse. They all promised they wouldn't!" He snapped harshly in response, ripping the shawl off and thrusting it back into a shocked Clara's arms.

Giving in to his sudden mood swing, the Doctor stood abruptly and stormed into a corridor of the TARDIS without even taking a second glance at Clara, who he'd left sitting bewildered by the console with the shawl tangled in her grasp. Terrified to venture into the caverns of the TARDIS to find him, she remained in that position for what felt like ages, her jaw locked and her eyes watering with tears.

Growing up, she'd always had a magic touch when it came to helping others. She'd regularly worked with underprivileged children and community members suffering from great losses. During her brief stint in a university, she had even talked a classmate out of terminating his life with a handful of pills and a bottle of whiskey. People took notice of her local heroism and took to lightheartedly calling her "Clara the Healer" for several years.

So why was the Doctor such a mystery to her? She could nearly predict his every move on their little adventures and possessed the intelligence to rival him even on his most inspired days. But when it came to his heart... Well, his hearts, she felt absolutely helpless. He'd built a wall so thick and so high that even mighty Clara the Healer couldn't scale it. She supposed he'd laid a brick for each tragedy he'd witnessed, and he'd been arranging those bricks for over a thousand years.

She'd only been busting walls down for two decades.

Once her body began to complain of hunger, Clara determined that it was time to lurk into the belly of the TARDIS and brave an encounter with the Doctor, who was likely still brooding. She had been sitting for hours and hadn't heard a peep from the corridor the raging man had disappeared through. She briefly wondered if he was huddled in a study somewhere brainstorming ways to get her out of his company. It was more likely, however, that he was just tucked away in his elusive bedroom, reminiscing about the days gone by that Clara feared she would never be permitted to hear about.

Wiping a few straggling tears from her rosy cheeks, Clara covered herself with the abandoned shawl and marched into the corridor toward the only kitchen to which she had mastered the route so far. She exhaled with relief upon finding no sign of the Doctor in the pale green, flourescently-lit room and rummaged through the surprisingly average-looking refrigerator for materials for sandwich making. As she navigated her way through the contents of the kitchen, she repeatedly glanced toward the double doors to the hallway, hoping for her familiar Chin Boy to make an appearance despite her fear of his unparalleled temper, but he never showed up.

The TARDIS became such a dreary place whenever silence fell upon it.


	2. Neglect

Clara's weeks passed without any interaction with the Doctor. At first, she was careful to avoid any place to which he may have wandered out of respect for his privacy, but, as the days without a single sign of him became somewhat nauseating, she began to drift to rooms he often frequented. Much to Clara's frustration, however, the bow-tied man was nowhere to be found. The warm, plush seats of his expansive library remained eerily vacant, and the colossal closet just off the console room was dark and untouched. Every so often, she ventured through the more unfamiliar corridors in search of his bedroom, only to find excess swimming pools and storage spaces. It was as if he had instructed the TARDIS to hide his own presence from her, essentially imprisoning him within his own kingdom.

One evening, Clara found herself going mad with cabin fever. She had scoured every hallway she could set foot in for the Doctor with no avail, and she hadn't seen the light from any sun in about a month. Without the incentive of seeing him each day, she'd given up on maintaining personal vanity and remained clad in her lavender nightgown with her tangled hair thrown into a knot at the base of her neck. Her eyelids felt tender and weighted, and her lips had begun to chap.

_ "It doesn't matter. It's not as if he'll be kissing me anytime soon." _She thought drearily as she sat curled in the center of her bed, absent-mindedly flipping through the worn pages of an Earth travel guide she'd nicked from a newsstand on some distant agrarian planet.

Needless to say, she missed kissing him. And talking to him. And seeing him. She wondered if he would allow her to do any of those things again, or if he'd simply have the TARDIS eject her bedroom while she slept. She fretted about him constantly and wondered if he fretted about her too. Did he miss kissing her? Talking to her? Seeing her? Did he even remember her? Was she just some insignificant speck on the timeline of his endless romantic history? She hoped she was more than that. They had something special. She didn't want it to melt away like a clump of butter in a frying pan.

Sighing quietly, she turned to a page advertising London and, wrought with sudden flashbacks of her first encounter with the Doctor, immediately tossed the thick travel book into a precariously placed glass cabinet a few feet away, which proceeded to shatter into dozens of shards, one of which sliced deeply into her shoulder through her gown. Finally cracking under the pressure of isolation, Clara emitted a sharp cry of pain and frustration and pressed her palm into the wound before doubling over and beginning to sob into her knees.

Before long, she felt the familiar arms of the Doctor fold soothingly around her trembling form. Her mind hazy with raw emotion, she barely registered his presence as he silently sat beside her and traced comforting circles into the small of her back with his hand. As determined as he had been to distance himself from the overwhelming affection of his new companion, not even an entire battle fleet of Daleks could have stopped him from running when he heard the ear splitting crash of the cabinet followed by Clara's wails of agony from across the TARDIS. During the minutes of sprinting he took to reach the centrally-located bedroom he had specially designed for Clara as he was searching for her after their previous encounter in Victorian London, he realized the true extent of the danger he had put her in by neglecting her so fiercely during his tantrum. He knew from experience that there was nothing more dangerous than feeling abandoned by a loved one. The worry could eat a person alive.

Overcome with guilt and regret as he assessed Clara's crumpled state, he swallowed back his own set of tears and quickly noticed the grim streak of red staining the sleeve of her nightgown.

"Clara, you're hurt." He choked softly, sliding the sleeve of her gown up to reveal an angry cut.

He looked to the glass pieces on the ground for an explanation before seizing a handkerchief from the nearby nightstand and holding it to the wound. Clara, growing pale from losing a rather significant amount of blood, continued to cry into her fists, ignoring the Doctor altogether. She felt a bit faint, and her thoughts were almost completely clouded with the mind-numbing pain accompanying the gash in her shoulder. At that moment, she didn't care about the Doctor. She just wanted to sleep off the pain.

"Clara, love, please look at me." He pleaded, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear in an attempt to coax her out of her shell.

"Get out if you're just going to leave again once you've assured yourself I'm not in any sort of critical condition. Better yet, let me out of your custody. Just drop me off into space! I don't want to be here anymore." She spat angrily at the Doctor, completely impervious to the magnitude of her obvious lies.

He winced at her words but quickly tossed his own pain aside in favor of handling hers. He knew she didn't mean any of it. She couldn't.

Without a word, he removed the blood soaked handkerchief from the wound, squeezed his eyes shut, and replaced the cloth with his own palm. Inhaling deeply, he released wisps of regeneration energy onto Clara's battered arm until all traces of the wound had vanished. Despite her anger, Clara couldn't help but gasp in amazement as he eliminated her pain with one touch of his fingers like some sort of magical spell. It was clearly a Time Lord thing, and it was almost impressive enough to erase the memory of the month of neglect completely from Clara's mind.

_ Almost._

"Where the _hell_ have you been?" She barked weakly after a moment of silence before scooting to the opposite end of the bed from the Doctor, half eager and half reluctant to escape his sensitive touch.

"Day and night, I looked for you. I could hardly eat or sleep. I was absolutely ill with worry. The TARDIS wouldn't tell me where your room is. For all I knew, you were dead in a closet somewhere!" She continued to scold as the Doctor flinched repeatedly, taken aback by her tone.

Before he could attempt to formulate a response, she grabbed him by the bow tie and positioned her newly-flushed face only a few inches from his own.

"I was just waiting for you to come and kick me out. If I'm not welcome here, if I don't mean a damn thing to you, just say the word, Chin Boy, and I'm gone." She whispered feebly, a new layer of moisture glistening to the brims of her eyes.

Without a word, the Doctor simply reached out and encompassed Clara in his grasp, pulling her gently onto his lap and cradling her head in his hands. He had missed her. He had felt the raging sting of separation just as strongly as she had, and every day of feeling too humiliated to keep from darting into her arms to profess how incredibly horrible he felt for pushing her away was utter hell. He had experienced a moment of severe weakness that had led to what felt like an eternity of cowardess, and she had paid the price. He wished she could see just how much she meant to him.

"There's something I want you to see." He whispered into her ear after several minutes of rocking her back and forth as she emitted the last of her tears onto his shirt.

"What is it?" She muttered drowsily, resting her head against his chest as he gradually cleared away all specks of negativity she harnessed just by holding her so close.

"I'll show you tomorrow, alright? You're exhausted."

Clara, too worn out to protest, nodded and snuggled up even closer to him as her eyelids began to flutter shut. Careful not to jossle her too severely, the Doctor lifted a nearly-unconscious Clara and laid her down onto the plush bed before tucking the turquoise bedspread around her and giving her a goodnight kiss on the forehead. Sure she had already drifted off to sleep, he stuck around for a few moments to revel in the sight of her. Her eyelids and lips were mildly swollen because of tears and fatigue, and bits of her mousy brown hair had slipped out of the ribbon holding it in a bun and fallen to frame her face in waves. He was sure he had never seen anything so beautiful in all one thousand years of his existence. And she had stayed for him. To give her an out during his temper tantrum, he had instructed the TARDIS to head to 21st century London and park outside of Clara's flat. They had been there the entire month of separation. Clara had needed only to open the doors and walk out, leaving the bitter old Doctor to mourn on his own.

But she stayed.

With a soft "Goodnight, love," the Doctor began to hoist himself from the bed, only to be stopped by Clara's tiny fingers lashing out to grab his wrist.

"Where do you think you're going?" She breathed almost inaudibly, tugging on his arm slightly while her lips curled into a signature pout that he was highly familiar with.

"I suppose I'm not going anywhere." He smirked and lowered himself onto the bed, untucking the bedspread to make room for himself.

"Damn right you aren't."

Clara shifted over slightly so that the Doctor wouldn't be left with one foot dangling over the edge of the bed and, after watching him spend an exorbitant amount of time struggling to remove his bow tie and unbutton the collar of his shirt, motioned for him to settle in closer to her. He eagerly complied, scooting over as far as he could without actually being on top of her, although he secretly hoped she would be likely to welcome that in the future. Teetering on the brink of unconsciousness, Clara rested her head on his chest and spent the last of the day's moments memorizing the rhythm of his heartbeats.

He succumbed to sleep shortly after that, dreaming of her.


	3. Surprise

They woke up in unison around twelve hours later.

Clara couldn't remember the last time she'd slept so peacefully. She hadn't dreamed. She hadn't really needed to. Her dream had been curled protectively around her like a castle all night long. She awoke to the unrivaled bliss of the Doctor, _her Doctor_, with his sturdy arms folded gingerly around her waist, his beautiful monstrosity of a chin resting against her hair, and their legs tangled intimately underneath the sheets. If not for the Doctor's promise to show her something new that day, she never would have made an effort to move.

"Chin Boy, I believe we have a date today." She teased in the midst of a deep yawn before turning to face him.

The Doctor, his hair wildly askew and his eyes thick with sleep, chuckled at his mousy bedmate's enthusiasm, more than relieved they were getting on again. Almost immediately, the pain he knew would be awaiting him at his and Clara's next destination set a disabling lump in his throat, but it was for the best that they go _there_. She needed to see what haunted him so violently throughout the day and night and sent his temper skyrocketing to a degree the human body could not even begin to process.

She needed to see what would happen to her one day.

"You go ahead and start getting ready. Dress warmly! I'm going to go program the coordinates into the console," the Doctor ordered before pecking her gently on the cheek and leaping out of the bed, flawlessly disguising his anxiety.

He discreetly shielded his watery eyes from Clara as he bounded from the room and sped to the console area, where he almost immediately collapsed against the cold wall under the magnitude of the day to come. As his emotions danced an angry jig all over his confidence, he wondered if he would even be able to make it through the next hour without a disastrous breakdown.

After all, he was planning on taking his new girlfriend to his late wife's grave.

River Song's trip to the Library had come shortly after the initiation of the Doctor's quest to locate twice dead Clara after the adventure with the snowmen, and it had absolutely torn him to shreds, sending his mission skidding to a screeching halt. The last of the Ponds had come and gone. An entire era of his life had come to a devastating close, leaving scars which would never heal. Finding Clara had felt like mission impossible at that point, as all leads had dried up completely while the Doctor mourned his wife. Now, Clara was miraculously with him, eagerly awaiting a surprise that he knew was likely to crush her. But she deserved every ounce of the truth, and he planned on delivering it to her.

Setting aside his crippling nerves for the moment, he hoisted himself from the ground and made for the metallic TARDIS console. After pressing an impressive series of buttons and jiggling an assortment of knobs and levers, the Doctor engaged the stabilizers and stood back as the TARDIS took off. In honor of River's memory, he'd begun flying without the brakes on, so he doubted Clara had been at all disturbed by the short flight.

She emerged from the west corridor about fifteen minutes later, donning a brown leather jacket over her favorite wintry blouse and slim jeans. Of the small collection of clothing she had brought on board, that particular outfit was his favorite, and she knew it. It hugged her petite form in the most flattering of ways and caught the attention of life forms far and wide. He often found himself battling the green-eyed monster in his soul when he caught anyone looking at her_ that_ way. But he couldn't bring himself to blame them. He looked at her like that every time he got the chance to.

"Ready?" He asked her, holding his arm out and beckoning her to join him.

"I was born ready."

"_I suppose somebody had to be,_" he thought, grasping her warm palm in his and leading her out into a clouded sky he knew all too well.

He had landed the TARDIS several paces from his actual destination. He needed time. Time to explain things to Clara. Time to prepare to grieve. Time to forgive time itself for taking his loved ones away from him one by one. Time to beg time to spare Clara the same fate.

Clara strolled alongside the Doctor, relishing in the feeling of their fingers intertwined between them. She gazed at the towering, sunlit forest the Doctor had landed the TARDIS in, admiring the maze of the ample underbrush and the spiraling height of the colorful canopy. As she observed the unfamiliar wildlife, she determined they couldn't have ended up on Earth. This was an otherworldly forest filled with otherworldly things. Clara marveled at the vivid patterns splattered across the coats of squabbling rodents and listened to the melodic calls of the birds nestled in the tree tops with wingspans greater than her height.

"This is incredible." She breathed in amazement, gasping with delight as a bright yellow badger-like creature darted across the path in front of them.

"Welcome to Zeyferious-7, the seventh of the twelve tropical rainforest moons of Deepho. The entire moon is held sacred by citizens of neighboring planets. So sacred, in fact, that nobody is permitted to set foot here. There's a death penalty awaiting all who attempt to cross through this atmosphere."

"How come nobody's frying us on the spot then?"

The Doctor smiled sadly and gave Clara's palm a squeeze.

"I suppose the owners of this place owed me a bit of a favor. They permitted me to bury somebody very important here. I'm allowed visits."

"Is it the owner of the reading glasses in the TARDIS? Is that who you buried here?"

"No, it was her daughter, Melody. My wife."

Silence overtook the forest, and Clara stopped dead in her tracks, releasing the Doctor's hand swiftly and clapping her hand over her heart.

"You lost your wife."

It was an epiphany, not a question.

Time stood still as Clara and the Doctor stared unblinking at one another, each attempting to process the sudden reveal with watery eyes and stitches in their hearts.

"B-but I yelled at you. I scolded you as if you were a selfish little boy. And you just took it. Y-you comforted _me. _Over a stupid broken cabinet. When you had a broken _heart._" She whispered, overwhelmed with the guilt of playing the victim when the Doctor had suffered through more than she could ever have imagined.

"Clara, love, you were hurt. Both physically and mentally. And you had every bloody right to be. You didn't know about River. I didn't tell you, and I should have."

"River? I thought you called her Melody." Clara asked after taking a deep breath of resignation and steadying her center of gravity which had been thrown dramatically off-kilter by the news.

"Her name is Melody. We called her River."

"Oh."

They stood mutely for what felt like decades after that, internally willing a bird to sing and pierce the veil of silence that shrouded the forest. Clara stared blankly at the littered ground beneath her feet, unable to chase after the speed trains carrying her thoughts throughout the incalculable spirals of her mind. She wasn't angry at the Doctor for keeping his secrets. She'd kept hers too. She loved him all the more for his mysterious nature and his guarded past. She'd just been taken aback by the enormity of it all.

_ Marriage..._

Clara's high school flames had all run off to America and married young. She'd watched each and every one of their rushed relationships crash and burn as their initially perceived reality of the world came crumbling down at their feet. Their dreams fizzled out like the last charcoals of a stove fire, leaving them helpless in between paychecks with hungry toddlers yanking at their hair. Her parents' marriage had suffered a similar fate, rendering a six year old Clara and her aged father homeless for three months on the streets of London while her mother raced off to Cape Town with some rich man who owned a massive enterprise and a collection of shiny cars she was told about in birthday letters. To Clara, marriage was a complete ruse. It began and ended with suffering and outlasted its termination with painful Child Support checks and years of unanswered questions slicing at the fringes of the soul with each passing day.

So how could a man with so much to lose maintain something as disastrous as marriage?

Clara supposed this River woman must have been someone extraordinary-someone Clara herself could never even dream to rise to the level of. Had the Doctor kept River a secret because he... missed her? Because he would have prefered traveling with her to traveling with ordinary little Clara Oswald? Because he looked at Clara and saw River, wanted River, _needed _River instead? Did he see her face when he shared kisses with Clara? Did he imagine River's hand clutching his instead of Clara's?

Could she really blame him?

Further down the path, the Doctor's thoughts were far less scattered but no less desolate and nerve-wracked. His main concern, as per usual, was Clara. As he stood watching her bathe in scalding silence, he wondered if he had told her about River too soon. Too abruptly. Too lightheartedly.

Too sadly?

He briefly considered that she might have asked to go home. She might have turned to him, eyes welling with tears of betrayal, and told him it was all over. Fortunately, the words she broke the thick silence with surprised him.

"Will you tell me about her?"

"Of course."


	4. Heroine

They were sprawled beside each other at the foot of River Song's polished headstone for hours on end, sharing laughter, tears, and everything in between while the Doctor told his stories.

He told her about the Daleks and the Cybermen and the Angels and how each of his previous companions had amazed him in physical and intellectual combat against them. He told her about running with Sarah-Jane, Rose, and River. He told her about his loves and his losses, his triumphs and his moments of weakness. He even told her about the Time War and the things he did and the things he didn't do and the things every fiber of his heart wanted to do but just couldn't do.

Most importantly, he told her about himself and how, despite having all the tragedy and vigor of time and space injecting its lovely poisons into every noteworthy moment of his history, he was a better man because of all of it. He had played both Saint and Sinner and put good and evil to shame. It instilled in him unparalleled humility coupled ironically with an otherworldly sense of self assurance.

He told her about his little habits that shaped his days and nights. He warned her he never left the cap on the toothpaste-and yes, Time Lords did need toothpaste. He giggled with her about his affinity for fish fingers and custard. He held her hand and fiddled with the silver rings lacing her fingers as she teased him about his wardrobe decisions. He felt her compassion for him radiating through the air as he told her about the Library and the Ponds.

She was amazed by his perseverance. He was amazed by her tolerance.

He supposed they were simply amazing.

"Do you think River and Rose and all the others would have liked me?" Clara asked after enduring what the Doctor thought was an incredibly riveting tale about somebody called Jim the Fish.

She rolled over on her stomach to face the Doctor, propping her head up on her arms and gauging his reaction to her question. The women who had come sauntering before her into the Doctor's life had left legacies woven into the songs and campfire tales of millions of civilizations across the universe, and she had hardly managed to so much as understand what the Time Vortex was, let alone bend it for the sake of the greater good. The Doctor had characterized these heroines as impeccable gods, and Clara considered herself a low class mortal with two left feet. She needed some sort of assurance that her lover's past wasn't itching to come to life and spit on her shoes.

"Would they have laughed at me?" She continued, after the Doctor had simply stared unblinking at her for several moments without responding to her first question.

"Laughed? At

_you_?"

His lips curled into a tender smile that made Clara's heart race as he reached out to swipe her fringe from her copper eyes.

"Who could ever laugh at such a beautiful little thing?" He breathed into the ultrasensitive crook of her neck, sending shivers down her spine.

He lingered there for a moment, relishing in the sound of her hitched breathing and the sight of the blush which had creeped its way up to her cheeks like a rosy vine. Smirking, he grazed the surface of her impossibly smooth skin with his lips before moving to kiss her affectionately on the forehead and leaning back to look her square in her wide, tear-brimmed eyes.

"Except you're not little. You're immense and powerful, and you have a presence fiercer than all the suns of the universe burning at once. You're going to do wonderful things, Clara. You're going to see me at my best and my worst, and you're going to save the day every time. We're going to run far and wide into the darkest stretches of the universe and face Lady Time herself together. And we will win. Because time cannot stop you. It cannot stop us. We won't let it. We can't. I've met hundreds of thousands of impressive people from hundreds of thousands of impressive places, but not one of them stood as impossibly tall and mighty as you, Clara Oswin Oswald. You are going to be _great_."

Unable to prevent tears of immeasurable joy from gliding down her cheeks, Clara silenced the Doctor by planting a deep, passionate kiss on his lips, basking in the feeling of his words binding her troubles and insecurities and banishing them from her mind altogether. He reciprocated with so much affectionate enthusiasm that he felt a deep pang in his chest when Clara finally pulled away, her lips burning a striking shade of rose from the friction of the kiss.

"Thank you so much for taking me here," she whispered, out-of-breath.

"Thank you so much more for staying."

Clara grinned and moved to stand, pausing to brush the contents of the forest floor off of her clothing. Her companion followed suit and clasped her hand in his, bending to give it a lingering kiss before he began to lead her back to the TARDIS's parking spot. Just as she began to follow him, Clara suddenly broke contact with him and shouted "Wait!" before darting back to River's gravestone. The Doctor watched in absolute awe as she bent to the delicately engraved rock and rested her forehead against the cool surface. Eyes squeezed tightly shut, she began to speak in a hushed tone.

"I'm so glad I got to learn about you, River, and I hope you are at complete peace wherever you may be. Thank you for caring for him before my time came, and thank you for leaving such an impression that your memory will ease his pain even after my death. I swear to all the gods and goddesses of this universe you may believe in, I will not let harm come to him. And I'll never leave him alone. I will love him as you did and hope he will be capable of loving me even a fraction as much as he loved you. Farewell, Melody Pond." She whispered so softly that the Doctor could hardly hear her voice.

A lone tear made its way to the base of her chin and fell to the headstone. Content with her goodbye speech, she rose from the ground and slowly returned to where the Doctor was standing, stunned at her exhibition of affection toward his late wife. Without a word, Clara yanked him out of his trance and began to guide him to the TARDIS, grinning ear-to-ear as she went. As the Doctor began babbling wildly about the reaches of the universe he wanted to show her next, she tuned him out and gazed up at the royal blue sky.

_Thank you, River. I'll take it from here. _


End file.
